Editorial: November ballots will contain a sales pitch for casinos

When New Yorkers go to the polls this November, they will find a campaign ad where the law prohibits them.

When New Yorkers go to the polls this November, they will find a campaign ad where the law prohibits them.

The subject is familiar — a constitutional amendment allowing up to seven casinos.

Where the casinos are located and when gambling will start is not something that regular New Yorkers get to decide. If we say we want them, the governor and legislators will take it from there.

Most people expected the ballot item to read like a legal notice, granting permission and letting it go at that. Four other ballot questions will greet voters, all phrased in neutral language without hinting that they should be approved or spelling out how they would help the state.

But the governor has decided that he really wants these casinos, so he is delivering a sales pitch.

As the head of the state Public Interest Research Group so eloquently put it, the proposition has "more spin than a roulette wheel." Approve the amendment, the proposition promises, and voters will be "promoting job growth, increasing aid to schools and permitting local governments to lower property taxes through revenues generated."

Even those who are upset at this excess admit the language is not illegal. That is true, of course, for the usual reason. Much of what the governor and legislators do is not illegal only because they make the laws.

There will be no equal time on Election Day. Nobody will be behind the curtain handing out fact sheets about gambling addiction, competition from the Poconos or the shaky financial condition of some of those who seek these licenses. Nor a photo of some seedy Atlantic City neighborhoods, asking if this is what people envision for the Catskills.

Between now and November, therefore, voters who have not yet made up their minds need to ask the major promoters of this proposition — in this area, Sen. John Bonacic and Assemblywoman Aileen Gunther — to be a bit more specific.

How many jobs? How much more money for schools? How much reduction in property taxes? They must know the answers, or they would not have allowed the proposition to go on the ballot with all those promises.